A first: A cease and desist Tweet

Remember Doctors Data? It’s the highly dubious medical laboratory that Trine Tsouderos exposed in her series on the quackery that is the “autism biomed” movement. A couple of weeks ago, Doctors Data also decided to launch what appears to be frivolous lawsuit against the creator and maintainer of the Quackwatch website, Steve Barrett; i.e. a SLAPP lawsuit.

Apparently unsatisfied with its legal thuggery against Steve Barrett, Doctors Data has apparently decided to plumb new depths by using new media to threaten other bloggers. This time around, Doctors Data has actually Tweeted a cease and desist threat against blogger Liz Ditz. Here’s the Tweet:

@lizditz Cease and desist libelling us or we will sue you. http://tinyurl.com/docsdata. Doctor’s Data Lawyers.

Although this one is fake – but could this ever work? I imagine that some people are most reliably reached via twitter. I imagine the day that hip lawyers start selling their services on social networking sites.

Although this one is fake – but could this ever work? I imagine that some people are most reliably reached via twitter. I imagine the day that hip lawyers start selling their services on social networking sites.

Although this one is fake – but could this ever work? I imagine that some people are most reliably reached via twitter. I imagine the day that hip lawyers start selling their services on social networking sites.

Although this one is fake – but could this ever work? I imagine that some people are most reliably reached via twitter. I imagine the day that hip lawyers start selling their services on social networking sites.

Although this one is fake – but could this ever work? I imagine that some people are most reliably reached via twitter. I imagine the day that hip lawyers start selling their services on social networking sites.

Although this one is fake – but could this ever work? I imagine that some people are most reliably reached via twitter. I imagine the day that hip lawyers start selling their services on social networking sites.

If we are to set for ourselves the goal of reaching people and helping reason become valued, then our tactics need to be taken into account.

To my mind, this parody site is an excellent use of humor to ridicule the foolishness of Doctor’s Data — both the foolishness of the “services” they provide and the foolishness of the litigation against Quackwatch and Dr. Barrett.

Although this one is fake – but could this ever work? I imagine that some people are most reliably reached via twitter.

Laws regarding legal notice virtually always provide for certain forms of notice. However, in many instances if you can show actual notification (e.g., a responding tweet, a court filing, etc.), that is enough to overcome an objection to the form of the notice.

I imagine the day that hip lawyers start selling their services on social networking sites.

It was an advertisement by a law firm on the old USENET service many years ago which ended up giving us the word “spam” in the internet world. You can thank them every time you get spam in your email. Lawyers have been polluting online social networking since it’s inception.

i still can’t decide if it is a serious site or not. there is this disclaimer before they link to the original chelation article that Quackwatch posted.

“Warning – there is science shit below. It will make your head hurt if you arenât a science nerd. REMEMBER – this stuff is super-secret, we canât let this shit go public, or it will ruin our scam 🙁 ”

hmmm…still can’t decide, even though i’m a science nerd.

wait there is also this disclaimer at the bottom of each page at the site:

“This is a non-commerical site designed for parody, criticism and commentary. It has ABSOLUTELY NO connection whatsoever with the Doctors Data, the Scientology sect or its affiliated organisations. All content should be treated as opinion and all trademarks/copyrighted material herein are owned by their respective trademark owners”

It’s getting really hard to tell truth from satire these days. Check out Mike Adams’ latest rant against chemotherapy, which culminates in him blaming pharmacists for getting cancer from poor health and safety practices in their workplaces, and advising people with cancer to refuse chemotherapy.

There seems to be a trend in the autism biomedical movement for doing tests on children then misinterpreting them using utterly inappropriate reference ranges, as is done to con people into thinking they have mercury poisoning.

I used to lurk on an autism biomedical forum where I saw perfectly normal alkaline phosphatase results from children interpreted according to adult reference ranges (children’s bones are growing so they have higher alkaline phosphatase results than adults) and parents told that their children have deranged calcium metabolism and needed to be put on a calcium restricted diet. I also saw raised BUN/creatinine ratios that were due to low creatinine interpreted as meaning that the child had kidney disease, which is nonsense. There were other similar abuses, but you get the gist. I did try to politely explain where they were going wrong, but was ignored, and eventually censored so I left.

I am inclined to think that the tweet was sent by a critic of Barrett (Bolen can automatically be suspected) who, while not representing DDI and probably not acting with their knowledge or approval, is trying to further the case. The individual could have falsely used the parody link to a) make the threat appear possibly to come from DDI and b) make Barrettâs defenders appear less credible once the bogus nature was discovered.

Hmmmn. What about a parody of Age of Autism — especially the comments? Out of my skill set, but surely somebody out there could?

They’ve gone so far into Poe territory that I’m not sure a meaningful parody could be done. There’s NOTHING so insane it wouldn’t be expected there.

A more interesting experiment would be for somebody to go “undercover” and start posting the most guanophretic lunacy they can come up with. I suspect the response would be enthusiastic acceptance. Kind of an updated Sokal.

Cease & desist tweets aren’t new–one of my colleagues got one a year ago today. Summary here http://bit.ly/17lTAG Original post (read from bottom, as she edited w/ new developments) at http://bit.ly/hggYD, and final chapter (?) here: http://bit.ly/6FqJ34. I’m beginning to wonder whether the Clinical Reader staff joined the mgmt team at SEED, though.

Something similar happened to a friend of mine last year when she was given “legal” notice via a tweet (the good parts version and the original version). The offending company seems to have pulled up its stakes and left the internet between then and now.

[email protected],
That’s right the green card lawyers in 1994. I had a tee shirt that said “green card lawyers, spamming the world” for many years until it wore out. At the tome I had a couple of exchanges with them about the propriety of such actions — it turned usenet into a mess of irrelevant crap (as opposed to simply a place of overheated arguments) soon after.